Cast Vote Records: A Database of Ballots from the 2020 U.S. Election

Project leads: Shiro Kuriwaki and Mason Reece

This repository includes the code to create the cast vote record dataset,

Kuriwaki, Shiro; Reece, Mason; Baltz, Samuel; Conevska, Aleksandra; Loffredo, Joseph R.; Samarth, Taran; Mutlu, Can E.; Acevedo Jetter, Kevin E.; Garai, Zachary Djangoly; Murray, Kate; Hirano, Shigeo; Lewis, Jeffrey B.; Snyder, James M. Jr.; Stewart, Charles H. III, 2024, “Cast Vote Records: A Database of Ballots from the 2020 U.S. Election”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PQQ3KV, Harvard Dataverse.

The repository is limited to issue tracking and maintenance of data construction scripts. It calls on a private Dropbox called CVR_parquet for subsets of cleaned in parquet format.

build.sh is the root script for the entire project.

There is a data descriptor accompanying this dataset, with the following abstract. Please access https://www.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PQQ3KV for a copy.

Ballots are the basis of the electoral process. A growing group of political scientists, election administrators, and computer scientists have requested electronic records of actual ballots cast (cast vote records) from election officials, with the hope of affirming the legitimacy of elections and countering misinformation about ballot fraud. However, the administration of election data in the U.S. is scattered across local jurisdictions. Here we introduce a database of cast vote records from the 2020 U.S. general election. We downloaded, standardized, and extensively checked the accuracy of a set of cast vote records collected from the 2020 election. Our initial release includes six offices – President, Governor, U.S. Senate and House, and state upper and lower chambers – covering 40.9 million voters in 20 states who voted for a total of thousands of candidates, including 2,121 Democratic and Republican candidates. This database serves as an unparalleled source of data for studying voting behavior and election administration.